Encyclopedia Judaica:Dalet

DALET (Heb. ד; דָּלֶת), the fourth letter of the Hebrew alphabet; its numerical value is 4. It is assumed that the earliest form of the dalet – as it appears in the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions – was a pictograph of a fish (Heb. dag)
. This developed in the South-Arabic script into
, and the early Phoenician dalet became a triangle ◁, which survived in the delta of the Greek alphabet: △. In the later Phoenician script the left angle was curved and the right stroke developed a downward tail
. The ancient Hebrew dalet also has an upper stroke drawn leftward
and thus in Samaritan too:
.

While the Phoenician cursive tends to open the circular head at its lower part
, the Aramaic script opens the top of this letter
. This developed into the Jewish
. As the dalet resembles the resh, it happens that both letters were written in the same way. Thus, in Syriac only diacritic marks distinguish between them. The Arabic د is an offshoot of the Aramaic dalet, which developed through the Nabatean cursive.

The modern cursive Hebrew dalet is a result of emphasizing the right upper angle, in order to distinguish it from the resh, and it developed as follows:
. See
*Alphabet
, Hebrew.